Mastercook 2020

Not as useful as I had hopped. As an accomplished home chef (retired) I now rely on the me knowledge of cooking methods and skills. this accumulation of recipes is almost valueless. (Pardonnez mon pauvre anglaise.)

Storing recipes. Love the calories, details, etc.

Using for catering business. User friendly app.

I change to this product because it was the next best cookbook application to Living Cookbook, which support for the app mysteriously disappeared, was a sad day when I had to finally let it go. MasterCook series are are currently the best out there, but very non user friendly compared to Living Cookbook. The first mistake I made was creating all my Cookbooks and uploading to the cloud, then deciding I didnt want them out there, I thought the solution was to remove them from the cloud and did so. much to my dismay, over 1500 recipes in 17 cookbooks vanished from not only the cloud but on my computer also. Had to start all over to recover what I had with lots of lost recipes. I learned quickly to constantly backup, backup and backup, to my computer, not the cloud. What led me to this review, is the mysterious disappearance of more than 300 items listed in my main pantry, over three hundred! And to my dismay, looking at my tools folder the .pl file for my pantry was there but empty and non recoverable. Needless to say that sucked. I have had this application now for well over a year plus, have put many, many hours of work into getting things the way I want them then POOF! it disappears in one fail swoop.

There is no ability to divide a cookbook into chapters.

Ive used this product in earlier versions for years, and have been able to import files from previous versions with only a small amount of difficulty. THIS version will only allow me to import the one cookbook Ive created, not any of those that came with previous versions, and does not seem to come with any of its own versions. Very disappointment. Am thinking of returning this and going back to my previous version. This is a waste of money.

Im not certain why Im giving it two stars instead of one. It installed okay. I tried to import recipes from a prior version using the directions from the publisher. That didnt work. But whatever. I just wanted to make a cookbook with it using a few family recipes. I wasnt interested in sending it in for publication: I just wanted to print and spiral bind a cookbook. The formatting tools are VERY limited: there is no way to make it look nice. I finally gave up and used a free Microsoft recipe template. That wasnt easy, but at least I could format things. Perhaps Im just inept. If you are just looking for a place to store recipes digitally, it might be okay. If you are looking to publish them, you may want to look elsewhere.

Don’t buy unless you want to spend hours and hours trying to do updates. My husband has bee trying to do the update for days. Support just keeps telling him to do the same things over and over. Unfortunately the backup didn’t work so our recipes are gone. We followed their instructions and it says there is a backup but after doing the update the recipes wont load. If you buy it don’t do any updates. Waste of money.

It’s like at all database I could’ve created myself. Not worth the money.

The only good things I can say is it was easy to install and set up. Ive used mastercook since version 5 but this will be my last one. Its hard to use and doesnt do everything they say it will unless you use the subscription service. Too bad because I was a long time customer but disappointed in this one.